“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people . . .” — The Declaration of Independence, 1776.

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We call it “human rights violations” when police in other countries intimidate their people by executing citizens on the street for petty infractions–but, when we do it it’s different.

London’s Daily Mail is reporting today that US police forces are now performing public executions like their German Nazi counterparts once did in a further bid to further terrorize their citizens, and as we can, in part, read:

Most interesting to note about the public execution by US police forces of this homeless man was the large crowd of Americans who stood idly by without coming to his aide, and which stands in sharp contrast with Chinese citizens who after their police forces beat a street vendor to death yesterday rioted against this shocking abuse of human rights in their knowing that if injustice isn’t stopped it only grows stronger. (Source)

Washington (CNN) — A program that allows airports to replace government screeners with private screeners is being brought to a standstill, just a month after the Transportation Security Administration said it was “neutral” on the program.

TSA chief John Pistole said Friday he has decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports, saying he does not see any advantage to it. (Source)

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Israeli tells MPs high-tech full-body scanners can be easily fooled.

Full-body scanners

A leading Israeli airport security expert says the federal government has wasted millions of dollars to install “useless” imaging machines at airports across the country.

“I don’t know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada on Thursday. “That’s why we haven’t put them in our airport.”

Sela, former chief security officer at the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defence technology, helped design the security apparatus at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. He spoke to MPs on the House of Commons transport committee via video conference from Kfar Vradim, Israel. (Source)

The body scanners are just one more obsolete technology that does not provide any more security…it can be circumvented not only in body cavities but in other ways that I do not want to share with the public. (Source)

Now documents have emerged, on the US government’s own web sites, raising questions as to whether the scanner machines are:

. . . little more than overpriced metal detectors with a “beam me up Scotty” futuristic design. . . . [because] while metal objects (like guns and knives) can be easily visualized in the body scanner images, there is “poor detection capability for a wide range of dangerous objects composed of low atomic number elements, such as plastics or ceramics. . . . [and] objects in body cavities will not be detected by these machines. (Source)

Tests of the full-body scanner at Suvarnabhumi Airport have left Airports of Thailand Plc (AoT) unimpressed, raising doubts about its effectiveness and cost. The machine was supposed to allow screeners to see through clothing to create an image of the body. The microwave imaging equipment was removed from the departure hall after only a few days of trial runs in late January as it was unable to detect objects including a piece of metal 2.25 square inches concealed on a person. (Source)

One security expert, Conservative MP Ben Wallace told IoS that scientists at the UK defense firm Qinetiq, a powerhouse in the “homeland security” market in Britain and the U.S., demonstrated that “the millimetre-wave scanners picked up shrapnel and heavy wax and metal, but plastic, chemicals and liquids were missed.” —precisely what the underwear bomber had stuffed in his briefs. (Source)

The London Independent reported on “authoritative claims that officials at the [UK] Department for Transport and the Home Office have already tested the scanners and were not persuaded that they would work comprehensively against terrorist threats to aviation.” (Source)

. . . underscores how the enhanced and invasive TSA security procedures are pure theater and do nothing to make anyone safer. (Source)

Prominent public figures have slammed the slap-dash introduction of invasive naked body scanners at airports, with Congressmen and security experts labeling them a stupid and pointless measure that does nothing but harass innocent travelers.

Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson slammed the hasty introduction of the scanners yesterday as nothing more than an example of security theatre that doesn’t even counter any supposed threat.

“I think we’ve gone way overboard,” Peterson told the Minneapolis Post. “I think a lot of what goes on at the airport is for show. It’s almost like we’re harassing passengers so they feel better.”

Crippled boy

Peterson pointed out that every time an alleged terror attack is foiled, the terrorists simply change their tactics, meaning the measures introduced as a response only inconvenience innocent people and do nothing to make anyone safer. (Source)

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported February 15 that the four-year-old disabled son of a Camden, NJ police officer “wasn’t allowed to pass through airport security” until he took his leg braces off.

The TSA has been lying to the American people about full-body scanners. The agency has insisted that these “digital strip search” machines are incapable of saving, storing or transmitting the images they take. This, we are told, makes it okay for people to be digitally strip-searched.

But secret documents uncovered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.EPIC.org) have revealed that these machines do indeed posses precisely such capabilities. According to TSA specification requirement documents that have been uncovered by the EPIC, all full-body scanners purchased by the TSA must have the ability to both save and transmit the scanned images of air passengers.

The documents were obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They have also been shared with CNN, which has viewed the documents and published a story about what they reveal. These documents contradict the claims of the TSA, which include the statement that “the system has no way to save, transmit or print the image.” (Source)

All full-body scanners purchased by the TSA must have the ability to both save and transmit the scanned images of air passengers (that includes children)

The TSA has been lying to the American people about full-body scanners. The agency has insisted that these “digital strip search” machines are incapable of saving, storing or transmitting the images they take. This, we are told, makes it okay for people to be digitally strip-searched.

Full-body scan printout

But secret documents uncovered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.EPIC.org) have revealed that these machines do indeed posses precisely such capabilities. According to TSA specification requirement documents that have been uncovered by the EPIC, all full-body scanners purchased by the TSA must have the ability to both save and transmit the scanned images of air passengers.

The documents were obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They have also been shared with CNN, which has viewed the documents and published a story about what they reveal. These documents contradict the claims of the TSA, which include the statement that “the system has no way to save, transmit or print the image.” (Source)

The scanners show such personal accessories as back braces, maxipads, adult bladder control pads,and apparently fake breasts, according to Politics Daily author, Sandra Fish, who’s article also relates that a friend of hers was forced to lift his shirt to reveal his colostomy bag to TSA screeners. Elderly travelers, who often face the stigma and ridicule of a youth obsessed culture, will now also face having to reveal the intimate details of their failing health to complete strangers or announce their personal ills before an audience of onlookers in order to avoid having to show what’s concealed beneath their clothes. (Source)

Relax, stored naked body images are of no interest to TSA officers–because they are professionals. Lol!

Celebrity actor’s airport body scan disseminated by security staff at Heathrow: The recent controversy in which body scan images of Indian Actor and celebrity Shahrukh Khan were printed and traded among security staff at Heathrow International Airport raises serious privacy concerns for many. (Source)

Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London. (Source)

When the scanners were first introduced at Australian airports in 2008 it was admitted that the X-ray backscatter devices don’t work properly unless the genitals of people going through them are visible. “It will show the private parts of people, but what we’ve decided is that we’re not going to blur those out, because it severely limits the detection capabilities,” said Melbourne Airport’s Office of Transport Security manager Cheryl Johnson. (Source1, Source2)

TSA admits they can even “see sanitary napkins in naked body scans.” (Source)

A mere month after London Heathrow introduced full body scanners, the first harassment case is already being investigated by the authorities:

One can only marvel at the full cultural import of widely available “x-ray vision” technology being deployed. Indeed, for those who remember the old X-ray Specs advertised on the back of comic books to see through women’s clothes, it is apparently a longstanding boyhood fantasy now set to become national policy. This is essentially a form of high-tech voyeurism masking as security, and it portends more such incursions into liberty and privacy. (Source)

“We don’t need to look at naked 8-year-olds and grandmothers to secure airplanes,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said last week. “I think it’s a false argument to say we have to give up all of our personal privacy in order to have security.” (Source)

Biometric Data Is Collected From Passengers and Stored in Government Databases

Law enforcement in fact illegally saves naked images produced by the machines. “The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week [August 2010] that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded,” Declan McCullagh wrote for CNet News.

The government has a keen interest in collecting and compiling biometric data on citizens. The FBI announced a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad, the Washington Post reported in December of 2007.

The Department of Homeland Security has collected biometrics for years, including the use of iris scans at certain airports under the guise of identity verification of travelers who have passed background checks and want to move through lines quickly. “The department is also looking to apply iris- and face-recognition techniques to other programs,” the Post added. (Source)

Roundup Ready: The Federal government is using Homeland Security, the FBI, state and local police, the credit card processors, Google, Facebook and probably those two beagles down the street to collect information (let’s not dignify it with the word ‘intelligence’) on each and every citizen. The goal? Right, our safety. To protect our freedoms… (Source)

Get Harassed If You say, “I opt out” (i.e., decline the sacnner)

The opt-out process seems to be designed to bring humiliation to passengers, because once you announce you’re opting out of the naked body scanners, TSA agents yell, “Opt out! Opt out!” in order to draw attention to you. Following that, they now feel up your crotch and private parts with their fingers and palms. The message is clear: Go through the naked body scanner or we will sexually molest you. (Source)

At ACLU.org, the nonprofit organization reports it has received 900 complaints and has posted over 38 graphic accounts that can only be described as sexual molestation. Brief examples include: (Source)

“The TSA agent used her hands to feel under and between my breasts. She then rammed her hand up into my crotch until it jammed into my pubic bone.”

“I cried throughout the groping and have had intrusive thoughts since. It was humiliating.”

Is Full-body Scanner Radiation Safe?

Allied Pilots Association president Dave Bates to avoid “the repeated radiation from the ‘advanced imaging technology’ body scanners used at many airports.” (Source)

Airport Body Scanning Raises Radiation Exposure, Committee Says

IAEA

(Bloomberg) — Air passengers should be made aware of the health risks of airport body screenings and governments must explain any decision to expose the public to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation, an inter-agency report said. The group includes the European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency and the World Health Organization.

Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, even though the radiation dose from body scanners is “extremely small,” said the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety report, which is restricted to the agencies concerned and not meant for public circulation.

The Backscatter full-body scanner emits T-rays or THz waves (terahertz waves), which is radiation that is positioned between microwaves and infrared rays on the electromagnetic spectrum. Any amount of radiation is dangerous, as it is cumulative, and poses a serious threat to all living cells through which it passes, leaving behind a trail of destruction and genetic mutations.

Boian Aleandrov, of the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory, however, has an opinion regarding the dangers of terahertz waves or T-rays:

Although the forces that terahertz waves or T-rays exert are small, their resonant effects can”unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. (Physics Letters A, Volume 374, Issue 10, 2010)

MIT’s Technology Review further explains in an article entitled:“Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA: A new model of the way the THz waves interact with DNA explains how the damage is done.” (Source)

Leon Kaufman, one of the leading medical physicists in the development of clinical MRI equipment in the 1980s, asks, “Are airport body x-ray scanners a great public health experiment?”

Contrary to every policy enacted since the effects of radiation were understood, we are engaging in a mass experiment of irradiation of not just adults, but also pregnant women, fetuses, children, women of child-bearing age, men who may conceive after exposure—in short, everyone unfortunate enough to have to be in an airport. The results will not be known for 20 years. Imagine if, as an investigator at UCSF, I had asked my IRB to allow me to carry out an experiment involving indiscriminate exposure to x-rays of a randomly selected population with no informed consent. (Source)

TSA Refuses to Release Radiation Safety Inspection Reports

In late November, 2010, USA TODAY requested current inspection reports for the 4,080 X-ray machines used to examine checked and carry-on bags, and for the 221 new full-body X-ray scanners. The TSA insists that all have passed radiation inspections conducted by contractors but has thus far been unwilling to release the reports. (Source)

Some TSA workers have filed complaints about poor maintenance and monitoring of X-ray machines, citing high cancer rates among agency employees that regularly work near the machines. One employee requested that a hazard assessment be conducted, which the TSA denied. (Source)

Members of Congress are now calling on the TSA to release radiation inspection records, and one lawmaker — Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass. — has asked for an investigation into the effectiveness of the TSA’s oversight of its X-ray machines. (Source)

Follow the money

According to Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama has pledged $734 million to deploy airport scanners that use x-rays and other technology to detect explosives, guns and other contraband. The U.S. and European countries including the U.K. have been deploying more scanners at airports after the attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound Northwest airline flight. (Source)

Terror profits

Former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt “a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery”—all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan. (Source)

This has been a great lobbying-marketing effort on behalf of the manufacturers.” Between 2005 and 2009, Rapiscan spent $1,678,500 on lobbying, according to data compiled at the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org). (Source)

According to the Washington Post:

Ex-Homeland Security chief head said to abuse public trust by touting body scanners

Washington Post (Jan 1, 2010)

Since the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports. Chertoff has been criticized “for using his former government credentials to advocate for a product that benefits his clients. ” (Source)

Probe of Chertoff Urged

One of the Chertoff Group’s clients is a company named Rapiscan. Rapiscan is in the money. Rapiscan makes full-body scanners to protect our airplanes from terrorists.

The trouble is when Chertoff was chief of Homeland Security, Homeland Security started buying scanners from Rapiscan for $160,000—that’s right, for each one. In fact, in 2008 alone, Rapiscan got $26.5 million from Homeland Security—and $41.4 million from all government agencies combined.

Chertoff Group is becoming the most high-powered and deep-pocketed national security consulting firm in the United States. According to insiders, Chertoff took full advantage of the attempted attack on Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, known as “the crotch bomber.” Chertoff claimed America needed full-body scanners to prevent these types of disasters. Chertoff wanted funding on a large scale, and Chertoff got it. (Source)

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Ratcheting up the police state

According to one commentator the naked body scanners, the useless security theater, and the invasive sexual assaults by TSA are nothing more than “slave training.” (Source)

Consider:

And it’s only getting worse. That TSA agents feel your crotch and breasts with their palms and fingers would have been unthinkable just five years ago. But this is how a police state works: They introduce one element at a time and then wait for everybody to get used to it before adding another layer of intrusion to their lives.

“Security” or “slave training”? Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Today it’s a naked body scanner and an X-rated feel-up. Five years from now, it could be TSA agents stripping off your clothes in a private screening room and inserting their fingers into your anus and other areas to check for “weapons.” If the American people don’t start standing up to these illegal, intrusive and humiliating body searches, there’s no end to where the TSA could take this. Give an agency like the TSA unlimited power to bully the public, and they will inevitably keep pushing the limits until they are stopped.

None of this seems to have anything whatsoever to do with actual air travel security, by the way. It all seems focused on maximizing the humiliation of air travelers while indoctrinating people into a police state mentality (so they get used to government agents strip-searching them on demand).

This is the new Amerika. Your Constitutional rights have been thrown out the window. Any expectation that you might be treated with respect as a law-abiding citizen have been utterly abandoned. You are now treated as a slavilian (a slave / civilian), and the federal government believes it has the right to commit sex crimes against you and your children any time it wishes.

Even our airline pilots are treated as criminals and terrorized by the very agency that claims to be protecting us from terrorism! The TSA is the new Gestapo, and they will absolutely will not stop with these police state tactics until they are forced to.

It is time that We the People stood up against the TSA Gestapo and started suing their agents for sexual molestation, child pornography, kidnapping, conspiracy and violating our Fourth Amendment rights. (Source)

While the TSA hires rapists to grope and fondle little girls, women, and the physically disabled in the name of security, it gives the green light to illegal aliens to fly planes and work at US airports, emphasizing once again that invasive “pat down” procedures have nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with treating the American people with less respect than farmyard animals. (Source)

“Behavioral detection” officer Minnetta Walker was arrested Tuesday by federal agents at Buffalo Niagara International Airport on charges that she provided information to suspected drug traffickers and helped them get past security checkpoints with minimum scrutiny,” reports The Buffalo News, yet another sad example among a long history of cases of TSA workers and criminal behavior.

“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?” (Source)

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

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The Bottom Line

These naked body scanners aren’t about preventing terrorism! They are about making money for certain people (eg Chernoff) who are politically connected. (Source)

We put these nude scanners out in airports early so that when you get sent to the FEMA camps it won’t be so much of a shock. You’ll be used to getting “processed” and seeing others get “processed”. (Source)

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And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? . . . the cursed machine would have ground to a halt. — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“We have a choice,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. “You can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning.” (Source)

We have spent $330 million US on new scanners at the airports. The total investment is expected to rise over $2 billion US within a few years for this effort alone. Not one, but several well-supported estimates have indicated that if the same $330 million US was spent to screen people for heart issues (with CRP tests and stethoscopes listening for heart issues), we would probably save a few thousand lives every year from cardiac failure deaths alone, let alone other causes. This is a few thousands of times more effective than any potential risk reduction from terrorism. This isn’t ironic, it’s criminal. (Source: comment)